Stand out in your next online presentation and delight your audience by using the online whiteboard Collaboard.
Presenting online is challenging as you do not see your audience; you need to handle the video conference solution and the online presentation software and focus on your content simultaneously.

And sometimes things do not work, like:

• The audio or video is not that good because of a bad internet connection
• The screen you share is blurred for your audience
• The audience sees all the animations delayed
• You can’t use videos in your presentation because of the delay when screen sharing (or when you use them, the quality is horrible).

Another challenge is to make online presentations interactive. As your audience is sitting in front of their laptop, there is a fight for attention.

The more engaging your presentation is, the higher the chance that your audience focuses on you and not on emails, pets, etc.

On this site, you learn how you present online without the screen sharing feature of your video conference solution.

Ensure that your audience always sees the content of your presentation in the highest quality (no blurred images, not delay) and save internet bandwidth to ensure a better quality of the audio and video stream.

You will get several tips on how to make your online presentation more interactive.

When you use an online whiteboard as the software for your presentation, you can do something similar to Prezi.

Collaboard provides you with an infinite whiteboard canvas to add different elements, documents, and media. All these things combined allow you to create amazing presentations.

Different drawing tools support you during a live presentation to highlight and annotate the content your present to emphasize important messages.

When you present with an online whiteboard, all your attendees will be on the board (you will not use the screen sharing anymore).

You can switch from presentation mode to interactive mode and engage your audience in an interactive brainstorming session with just one button. Collect answers for questions, vote on hypotheses, or rate ideas.

When preparing your presentation, consider the infinity of the canvas, the different elements, the drawing tools, and the interactivity options.

1. Define where to start

When you create a new project in Collaboard, you start in the center of the canvas, and this is a good place to start with your presentation. Now you can add to this location a title, an image, or other elements that the people see as your first “slide”. 

2. Create the “slides” of your presentation - QuickLinks

Of course, we don’t have slides on an online whiteboard, but we will use this term for further references to make it more understandable. 

In Collaboard, you can select a group of elements (like the text and the image you want to show at the beginning of your presentation) and transform it into a “QuickLink” (learn here how to create them). This quick link becomes your first slide of the presentation. When you have multiple QuickLinks, you can jump between them and therefore go from slide one to two and so on. 

3. Combine the different elements 

In Collaboard, you can add the following elements to the canvas you can use for your presentation: 

• Sticky Notes: Instead of bullet points on a slide, use sticky notes.
• Text: Use text elements for titles and longer text passages.
• Images: Use images for visualizations, upload your own, or use the integrated image search
• Videos: Upload videos to your canvas, or record them with the camera directly or use the integrated YouTube* search to add a video 
• Documents: Import your existing presentation (PowerPoint or PDF) into Collaboard and reuse them there. 
• Shapes: More than 200 different shapes are ready to use 
• Embed websites or gifs on your canvas.

*In case your video is not on YouTube but other platforms like Vimeo, you can try it with the embed feature in Collaboard.

4. Apply your style and be consistent 

For an outstanding online presentation, it is not only the content relevant but also the design. Collaboard offers you over 16 stylish fonts and the option to apply everywhere the color of your choice. A handy color picker allows you to grab the color from any element on your canvas. 

Don’t remember the hex color code of your company? No problem, just upload your logo and get the color with the color picker. With two clicks, all your elements will have the color of your choice. 

5. Red thread through your presentation

Connect the content on your board that belongs to each other. Visualize for your audience the red thread through your presentation using the connector feature in Collaboard. 

Of course, the connection doesn’t need to be red. Apply your style there as well. A very nice application is the dashed connector; it makes your presentation look a bit like a treasure map. 

When your content is prepared, you are ready for the presentation. Follow these exact steps to start your presentation.

1. Open Collaboard and the project for the presentation & start the videoconference.
2. Create an invitation link for your audience: 
1. Make sure your audience only has viewer permissions.
2. Define if your audience needs to identify itself or just join as guests (the advantage when they don’t need to identify themselves is that with just one click, they can join your board)
3. Share the link in the chat.  
4. Make sure the number of people on the board matches your audience. 
5. Start the presentation mode.

What does the presentation mode exactly do: 

• All people on your board follow your view of the board. This means when you jump from QuickLink to QuickLink; then this is happening for all the others. They also follow you when you don’t work with QuickLinks.
• Your mouse pointer is visible for all others; it is like a virtual laser pointer.
• You are the only person that can interact with the content. This means during an ongoing presentation; you can draw, highlight and create and move elements. 
• When you start a video, the video starts for all others as well*

*When you start a video, it is streamed to each person individually. This means people see the video in its original quality and hear the sound. 

One significant advantage of using an online whiteboard like Collaboard as a presentation tool is seamlessly switching between presentation and interaction.

Let’s make a simple example of an interactive experience during a presentation, where you want to collect ideas from your audience.

Proceed like this:

1. Prepare an area on your presentation board for the interactive session. (when you want to collect ideas, it can be helpful to prepare sticky notes on which your audience can add their ideas).
2. Stopp the presentation mode and grant your audience editor permissions. Now they can interact with the content on the board and add their ideas.
3. As soon as the interactive part is over, start the presentation mode again. When you start the presentation mode, all participants on your board automatically get viewer permissions, so they can’t interact with the content while you present.